Linux News Today: Unvanquished Celebrates Four Years of Alpha Builds, Beta Just Around the Corner

The developers of the open-source and cross-platform Unvanquished FPS (first-person shooter) game have announced today, March 14, 2016, the release of the 49th Alpha build.

Unvanquished Alpha 49 is not an ordinary Alpha release of the project, which has been in development for the past four years, but an anniversary one, celebrating the debut of the first Alpha build announced back on February 29, 2012.

On this occasion, the Unvanquished team is happy to inform everyone who contributed to and tested the game during all these years that the project is ready to leave the Alpha stage of development behind and jump on the Beta bandwagon.

“We’ve certainly made a lot of progress since then, and it shows! Four years of constant monthly releases have brought us to this point, and we’re closer to beta than we’ve ever been before,” say the Unvanquished devs in today’s announcement.

Introducing the tile-based forward+ renderer

The Alpha 49 release of the Unvanquished FPS game promises users one of the biggest new features so far, a brand new tile-based forward+ renderer, which consists of a new method for creating the lightning in the game.

It appears that the tile-based forward+ renderer is much better than a deferred renderer, as it provides for multiple dynamic lights to be available on-scene simultaneously while keeping the performance at the same levels.

Furthermore, Unvanquished Alpha 49 adds performance patches for users who have been using the graphical effects on low-end computers and implements support for physical-based shading.

There might be one or two Alpha releases of Unvanquished until it enters the Beta stages of development, which should add support for shadows to the new tile-based renderer, and, of course, even more, bugfixes.